About Cary Nelson

By Alan Wald

“Il Miglior Fabbro”

IN the final entry of their droll yet eminently
sensible Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education (1999),
co-authors Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt cast a cold eye on academic “Yuppies.”
The reference is to a new generation of careerist professors who “do a
cost-benefit analysis before they say hello in the hallways.” With an
exaggerated sense of entitlement, this fresh crop of elitist academics seems to
look upon every institutional service performed as “an immense concession,
despite the fact that many departments now mentor young faculty devotedly and
guard their time and interests with some care.” Thus is created a culture in
which “shameless requests for privileges and benefits never granted anyone have
become routine.”

To remedy to this drift, one that transcends
traditional ideological commitments to Left and Right, Nelson and Watts insist
that “It is an entirely possible to be a productive scholar, a successful
teacher, and still define some areas of major community involvement.” As an
example, they point to “graduate student union activists” who “juggle all those
arenas and manage to adjust the balance often enough to satisfy all three.”
For established scholars, however, the premier illustration would be Cary
Nelson himself.

With the appearance of Manifesto of a Tenured
Radical in 1997, Cary became the national exemplar of the committed scholar
who conceived of the advance of his own career in the context of the
amelioration of the rank-and-file of the academic community; more
specifically, graduate students, part-time employees, and campus workers.
Indeed, Cary has succeeded so brilliantly as the scourge of bankrupt university
administrators and head-in-the-sand officials of the Modern Languages Association
(to whom he recommends his roguishly-titled “Twelve-Step Program for
Academia”), that one might fail to apprehend the full import of his coupled
contribution as the foremost researcher and theorist of modern social poetry of
his generation.

As an exact contemporary of Cary, I have observed
the arc of his career with considerable wonder. Cary was born on May 15, 1946,
in Phildelphia, fifteen days before myself. We were both raised in liberal
Jewish families and we both attended Antioch College in Ohio during the
mid-1960s. Antioch was in those years an experimental work-study school with a
bohemian culture especially known as a haven for civil rights activists and
“Red Diaper Babies.” Although we were assigned to separate divisions (I was
working at jobs around the United States while he was studying in Yellow
Springs, and vice versa), we studied with the same literature professors and
were both active in the campus chapter of SDS (Students for a Democratic
Society).

However, Cary somehow managed to graduate in 1967,
a full two years ahead of myself. Before I knew it, he had his Ph. D. in hand
from the University of Rochester--when I had finished only one year of graduate
study at Berkeley! By 1973 Cary published his first book, The Incarnate Word:
Literature as Verbal Space, and he was already tenured at the University
of Illinois in 1975 when I commenced my first year as an assistant professor at
the University of Michigan! One year after his second book, Our First Last
Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry (1981), Cary
became a full professor.

In the mid-1980s, Cary also inaugurated a prolific
career as an editor of scholarly volumes—now numbering at least fifteen—and as
a member of various editorial boards (PMLA, Literature and Psychology, College
Literature, and so forth). But it was only at the end of the decade that
the true significance of his career for our generation of scholars became
evident to me.

In 1983, I had heard that Cary organized a
conference of national significance on “Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture.” That came as something as a surprise because I had not particularly
associated Cary or his work with Marxism. But then the volume of that name
(co-edited with Lawrence Grossberg) appeared in 1988, and it was unmistakable
at once that Cary was an adroit and refined theorist of contemporary Marxist
schools. One year later, when Repression and Recovery: Modern American
Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 was published, Cary
also displayed the scholarly qualities that instantaneously led me to regard
him as a model for myself and others—one with the capacity to enjoin innovative
theory with meticulous and fresh research into the very texture of united
States cultural history, as seen from the bottom up.

Since that time Cary, has complemented his elegant
interventions into the academic profession with a steady stream of scholarly
volumes that have opened up new regions for research and theorization. Some of
these have been pursued by his own extraordinary group of graduate students,
such as Lawrence Hanley, Jefferson Hendricks, Walter Kalaidjian, Michael
Thurston, and Mark Van Wienen (just to mention a few whose work I have had
occasion to evaluate). In addition to books already cited, Cary has served as
editor and co-editor of Edwin Rolfe: A Biographical Essay and Guide (1990), Cultural Studies (1992), The Collected poems of Edwin Rolfe (1993), Higher Education Under Fire (1994), Trees Became Torches:
Selected Poems of Edwin Rolfe (1995), Madrid 1937 (1996), Disciplinarity
and Dissent in Cultural Studies (1996), Will Teach for Food (1997), The
Aura of the Cause (1997), the Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry (2000), and The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems About
the Spanish Civil War (2002). Additional books that he has individually
authored are Shouts From the Wall (1996) and Revolutionary Memory (2001).

This avalanche of titles—and I have not touched on
his innumerable essays, reviews, and conference papers—is even more astounding
when one acknowledges Cary’s exceptional abilities as a writer. Like few
others—Perry Anderson, Terry Eagleton, and Michael Berubé come to mind—Cary has
the capacity to render the complex luminously lucid without the sacrifice of subtlety.
Indeed, it is Cary’s mastery of his craft that accounts for an ample part of
the impact of his work.

So, how does he manage it all? What is the
“secret” of Cary’s magnificent balancing of such scholarly attainments with
extraordinary activist social commitment, as well as dazzling teaching and
mentoring?

It all comes together because Cary’s vision as a
scholar is, in fact, the guide to his fierce partisanship for an academic
freedom and commitment to a university community vigorously defended by its
tenured professors. In the “Introduction” to Manifesto, Cary reveals
that his rage (often tinged with sardonic humor) at hypocrisy and selfishness
in the “actually existing” institutions of English literature is motivated by
his love of the potential of the profession: “More perhaps than any other
discipline, literary studies has reformed and opened its intellectual life in
such a way as to fulfill a commitment to democratic values.” Any doubts about
the legitimacy of this claim can be assuaged simply by looking at the
remarkable career of Cary Nelson.

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Reprinted from Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor.ALAN WALD is Director of the Program in American
Culture at the University of Michigan and most recently author of Exiles
From a Future Time (2002).